


We Must Refuse to Disappear

by Ghostcat



Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV)
Genre: Book Spoilers, Desire, F/M, Grief, Hate Sex, It was supposed to be porn, Loss, Love, Storytelling, fucking with narratives, i don't know what happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-16
Updated: 2017-06-16
Packaged: 2018-11-14 17:13:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,695
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11212560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ghostcat/pseuds/Ghostcat
Summary: He loves me, he loves me not.  I rebel or I don’t.  She finds me out and I am caught.  Or I run.  You decide what the truth is.//  June Osborne, Nick Blaine, and a night that might have happened.





	We Must Refuse to Disappear

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place right at the end of both the book and the first season of the TV series.
> 
> Passing mentions of canon violence.
> 
> Rated M for sexual situations.
> 
> Thank you to BryroseA, cheshirecatstrut, and MachaSwicket for beta reading this. I never learned how to read so your help is immeasurable.
> 
> Come follow me on Tumblr: @ghostcat3000

 

We must resist. We must refuse to disappear

I said, In exile  
survival  
is the first necessity.

After that (I say this  
tentatively)  
we might begin

Survive what? You said

In the weak light you looked  
over your shoulder.  
You said

Nobody ever survives.

—Margaret Atwood, from  _Roominghouse, winter_

 

//

     I don’t mean to make you choose but you need to know that you will have to. You should know that there’s choice. The reader becomes the historian, and the historian decides the slant.  

     Perhaps that’s more important than my story, which could go any number of ways—counted by the finger, detailed in a list. How I remember it. The way the tale changes given distance, time, or proximity. The manner in which it must be constructed in order to make sense. Small changes that had to be made; adjustments to the narrative. To add a knife-raise of excitement or a sliver of suspense. Not lies or exaggerations but small omissions. Secrets. His face, unreadable and contained. He loves me, he loves me not. I rebel or I don’t. She finds me out and I am caught. Or I run. We both run. I stay but get away with all of it. He stays and winds up on The Wall. I have a baby or I don’t. You decide what the truth is. Or was. So many possibilities; possible facts to sift through and discard, swallow whole.

//

     This could have happened, if there’d been time.

     Nick’s room has a record player but no records. There’s a shelf beneath it for books, books bleached white from sunlight streaming through the side windows, books sleeping under a blanket of dust. I would eat up every dirty word.

     “You need books that aren’t about wars.”

     He says nothing. He never says anything. Never, as Luke would explain to our daughter, means not even once.  _Don’t use it unless you mean exactly that._  Luke was always a bit of a pedant. I loved him anyway.

     I’d still read them, Nick’s books about battles. I'm that hungry. But I’d prefer other stories. Or maybe, write my own. One about my daughter. How I need to find her. What I need to do in order to find her. I value my hands, but I cherish her. Cherish her memory like a lock of hair kept in a locket, tiny teeth in a pillbox, a faded blanket—standard hospital issue: white, teal, and dark pink.

     Hannah, five years-old. She stood slightly above my hip. She liked to eat yogurt in the morning. She would grab it herself from the fridge while her father and I slept late on Sundays. I hope she has yogurt, wherever she is. I hope it’s blueberry. Her favorite. My stories about her are small; short stories.

     Nick uses the back of his hands to caress my face, brushing his knuckles against my lips. I bite at his skin, harder than a lover should. I want to tell him, say, _She’s eight now. She must be eight._ I, too, say nothing but touch all the same.

     I would like to lie and say I returned to him because I had a plan to make him suffer. Or that he left his door open again because he’d missed the woman he knew best in the dark. Those are lies. The truth is simpler. We went back to one another, the way sun-starved plants tilt forward at the windows, chasing whatever light they can reach.

//

     We had a nor’easter and the world went white. Mrs Waterford was with her mother, The Commander was at the new Capitol and I slipped in the driveway. That was the causality-chain—ailing parent, possible government strife, and no one to mind the store for, ergo unsalted paths on the frozen concrete. The sole of my shoe slid on a patch of ice and in a second, my eyeline went from iron gates to skies. I braced myself for the hard hit of the sidewalk but instead saw Nick’s face, his arm around me, pulling me to standing. I hadn’t even known he was there. I’d gotten used to deleting him from the page.

     “Black ice,” he said and I blinked, thinking it was code and hating myself, hating, for feeling heat course through me at his touch. All those layers of material—cape, sweater, dress, undershirt, bra—and his hand sliding up my back like a fire on bare skin.

     “Thank you,” I whispered, eyes fixed on his; dark, smooth and unreadable. His mouth, a pouting circle. I wanted to hit him right on his mouth. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted him inside of me. I sound like pornography. I want. Too much.

     “Under His Eye,” he replied.

     His fingers at the nape of my neck, reading the bones there. At the doorstep, removing my cloak.

     An empty room, all glass but dim with gray light. I can see the guards outside, standing at the gate, their eyes trained towards the market path. I reach back and put my hand on Nick’s crotch. It isn’t magic. I know he is there. Right behind me and hard at my palm. That isn’t magic either.

     What is magic is this: he backs away. And I understand then, I can follow or not. It’s my choice.

//

     I didn’t go anywhere after all. The sidewalks were a glittery menace, nearly whited-out by the slanted lines of silvery-hail coming down like judgment. Groceries were delivered by a Guardian I’d never seen before and Rita seemed happy, almost, less irritable anyway. Nick shrugged and swiped a carrot off her countertop, biting into it with nasty, violent crack and sauntering off to the door leading to the patio. I don’t hear it open so he must still be inside. Waiting or listening.

     He talks even less now than he did before he called things off. Which doesn’t seem possible. Even his breath seems less giving. His eyes say more though, they flicker with impatience; touching me in hallways and at dawn as I stand by my window, unwrapping me like a present to be enjoyed later, when nobody’s watching. Who watches him anyway, besides me? An eye for an Eye.

     I miss his touch, the gift of something that feels good, for me. His tongue in my mouth, on my nipples, fingers walking up leg, past the high socks we have to wear in winter. The finest in Gilead’s woolen Handmaiden lingerie, scratchy and a washed-out, dull brown. He used to leave my socks on, reaching down to touch them as we fucked. That’s not true. I used to leave them on, so I could look at them slung over his shoulders. I liked it.

     Sometimes he stares down at my socks, like right then in the kitchen, carrot in his mouth, the picture of insolence; my legs and feet, my ridiculous shoes. I lifted the hem of my red dress to scratch at my ankle, fingers trailing up to my thigh. And further. Rita was at the sink, her back to me, she didn’t see a thing.

     Nick leaned forward, breathing. Turns out he’s a leg man.

     Later, long after the final bells and the house is asleep, he goes down on me, using two fingers while he licks his way inside. It feels like some kind of payback. I shake and shake, my feet still wet from the secret walk to his door. His open door. I soak his bed.

     Afterwards, I ride him facing that door, up and down, my hand feverish between my legs. His are spread wide, opening up my thighs. I think, I will split open, parted in two like a Bosc pear. He grunts.

    “My husband is taller than you. More handsome. His hands are softer. Penis is bigger. He could fuck me for longer.”

     He grips my hips hard and pushes up roughly, startling a yelp out of my throat. I cover my mouth.

     I continue, talking through my fingers, kissing each one, every syllable timed to the rise of his pelvis. “He’s alive you know. I wish I was kissing him. Instead of you. I wish. He. Was the one saying. My name.”

     Nick's not kissing me. He doesn’t say my name. And I never said this. I never touched him again. Never snuck through the snow. Never took off his clothes like I was starving, pushing him back on the bed ahead of me so I could stare and stare.

     Or maybe I did.

     Maybe I lifted my skirts so they wouldn’t get wet, keeping my eyes on the guards as I crept silently up Nick’s stairs. Fearless the way people are fearless sometimes when little freedoms are promised. Maybe I’m lying about lying, because I can’t admit that I was ever that weak.

     Let’s say it is true and I did those things. Said all those words as I fucked Nick in his little room. That instead of keeping my eyes straight ahead, longing for my husband, I looked over my shoulder and watched Nick pant, something hard in his eyes that made the build that much better. Enough to come again at the rise, right as he does, the sizzle of a match against a brick wall. A blue flame, a red wall. He pulses inside me and I squeeze hard, before falling back on top of him, sweat-slickened skin to skin sliding. Slippery wet then cold, his breath minty at my neck, our hands intertwined, ice hitting the windows like a circle of people throwing stones. Every hour, a searchlight, passing through, over our limbs, faces.

     Let’s say it’s true and that afterwards I do all the talking. I talk about my daughter. Tell him about how, when she was learning to talk, she began substituting an _oa_ sound in words with a’s or simple, short o’s. Cat became Coat. Mommy became Moamy. Daddy, Doaddy. Love, Loav. I think, for a moment, that he’s smiling. He doesn’t speak, but he listens. Or he knows what to look like when he’s listening.

     Let’s say I love him then.

     I am laughing, then I’m crying, back to laughing. I quiet, not because his hand is on my chest, but because I am breathing, alive, and I need to find her. I need to find Luke. I need to keep my fucking shit together. I need to live.

     “He can read,” I say softly. “Can you? Are those books you pretend to read?”

     Nick touches my hair. He looks so young in the half-light. Younger still, when asleep. I have no idea how old he is. He could be twenty-two, he could be thirty. I can’t actually tell. Who was he before all this? Did he work at a gas station? In a mine? At a car plant? Did he clean the hallways of buildings? Did he come into my office and clear out my trash and I never even looked up from my screen because there was a sale on Net-a-Porter? Would I have wanted him like this if I’d known him before, would I have had the same overwhelmingly chemical reaction to his proximity? With him, I’m in the dark. I know nothing, but I feel my way around. His skin smells like soap and cigarettes, the sweet kind I used to sneak in junior high out by Mt. Auburn cemetery. Fingerfucking and nicotine and death.

     His mouth is open and I resist the urge to put something in there, the cellar spider hanging from the windowsill or my underwear. I watch him instead, observe him until his sleep turns dark and the thrashing begins. He speaks, clear and loud, “No, don’t. Don’t,” and I place my head on his chest, listening to his heart as it slows. I fall asleep too eventually, trying to direct myself there, to the threshold of his nightmare. Ready to shape it with my hands, make it safe again.

//

     But I’m jumping ahead, almost to the last page. It was snowing and Nick was eating a carrot. No Commander, no Serena Joy, no shopping. In my head, I was burning. He walked out of the room but not out of the house. Rita stood, her back to us, lost in her suds. I took my glass of cranberry juice and let it slip through my fingers onto the counter, the glass shattered and the red swirled up and out in a graceful arc right onto Rita’s uniform. A scarlet letter of diversion. This was in the past, let’s pretend we’re in the present.

     “You're so clumsy! This is going to stain!”

     “I’m sorry.”

     (I’m not sorry)

     “Why do you always give more work?”

     (Always, as in every time)

     “I didn’t mean to.”

     (I absolutely meant to.)

     Her scowl lines are etched into her face, this is how her face rests. Resting misery face, because bitch is not accurate. Rita conducts a symphony of slammed cabinet doors before finding some white vinegar and laundry soap and stirring it rapidly in a perfect tinkling crescendo of irritation.

     “I have to take this off, I can’t clean it like this,” she says, frowning at the line of juice on the counter, kicking at the glass shards. “This is a disaster.”

     (Really? This?)

     “I'll clean up. I’m sorry. Go rest. Take a hot shower.”

     Her shoulders sag. “I’ll go take a shower,” she says. As if I hadn’t just said it, like she’d just thought of it. Like magic.

     She exits the room and goes up the stairs. Nick appears in the doorway. He never quite enters a room, he doesn’t creep or blend, he seeps in. Slow and steady. He’s ink, spilling on a dark floor and I watch its progress with dread and fascination. Because that’s a stain. And I want to put my fingers in it and draw all over the walls with my blue-black hands.

     “Are you okay?” He seems unsure, as if he’s not allowed to ask. If that is what he’s feeling, uncertainty; really, it could be anything. His face is just blank enough to leave all emotion open to interpretation. Words as a script to be followed. He must be an excellent spy.

     “Help me,” I say, and turn, leading him back to my room. Repeating it as he enters through the door that doesn’t quite close. Then again, before I touch his belt loop to pull him closer, adding, “We have five minutes. That’s how long she usually takes.”

     We are not quite mirrors; our movements are not in sync, nor are they symmetrical. We are a beat or two behind one another, music played by drunks or cowards. Jittery but slow, not quite right. If we are sound, then we are a melody played by strings. One note of beauty barely supported by a warning dissonance—the sense that it can’t settle or resolve. We hang in the air with no conclusion. But then, he’s closer, as am I. I step forward, he shifts in counterpoint. We are in touching distance.

     I get down on my knees because I want him in my mouth. I want him in my mouth because I want my throat to close and open around him. I want to stop breathing as he pushes into my mouth, the soft skin of his stomach pressing against my forehead. My mouth. Blotted out. I want to not know or think. Before I can unzip his pants, he kneels too, rubbing his thumb on my cheekbone. He shows me the blood. I am bleeding.

     “The glass,” he says, soft like the curve of a consonant, and puts his head to mine.

     We breathe together, he closes his eyes, I leave mine open. “Four minutes.”

     There’s a small patch of stubble on his cheek. He’d missed a spot.

     “Did you hear?”

     He nods. I don’t know what he thinks he’s answering. He doesn’t know, nobody knows. In this draft, only I know I’m pregnant.

     Upstairs, the water is running and Nick kisses me, his fingers a v at my chin, thumb at my jaw. Faintly, I can hear Rita singing _Amazing Grace_. He kisses my collarbone, my neck, my earlobe; so soft, it’s a murmur, not a smack. Back to my mouth, slow and mournful, as if it were the last time. (It's always the last time.) He picks up my hands and kisses them as well. He says, _I’m sorry._

     This might have happened. Just like this. 

//

     Rita takes fifteen minutes, not five, and when she comes back down, the kitchen is clean. She walks slowly, covering her damp hair with her Martha’s cap and yawning wide enough for me to catch the fillings on her molars. It’s just the two of us for now but Nick will be joining us for supper. This is unusual. She raises her eyebrows but voices no dissent. This is how it is with everything. We have extra guards, we have food. If we are told we’re safe, then safe we’ll be.

     Nick arrives, as if he hadn't just been there, not that she knows. Rita hands him a cup of tea, he accepts it with a nod. I watch them like it’s the latest episode of The Bachelor. I never thought I would add that to the list of things I miss but it’s true. I miss making empty decisions. Watching bad television, drinking beer and making fun of weeping women in evening wear fighting over some lunkhead. No, the irony is not lost on me.

     They make an odd pair, Nick and Rita. She gripes as he helps himself to what’s on the counter but she lets him do it. Even though he is low status, so she certainly doesn’t need to. Is she kinder to men generally or just him specifically? He drinks his tea and washes his cup. She smiles to herself. I have no part in it. I’m invisible. The camera, recording it all.

     Dinner is soup because we cannot use the good stuff. It looks delicious, with tiny pearl-like pieces of pasta and spinach. Rita drinks wine as she makes it and something of that hazy, free spirit is in the flavor. I have no idea where the alcohol came from. I don’t ask but I stare at the bottle, the vintage is 2015 and has a drawing of a blackbird on it. Nick turns the bottle so the label faces out, as if presenting it. I read every detail. He pours himself a glass but doesn’t drink it.

     By the time we’re halfway through, Rita is leaning forward on her chair, propping herself up with a fist. She half-rises, then falls back, an errant wave, giggling at some story about her sister who was nearly buried without pants because the garment bag didn’t make it to the funeral. She asks Nick where his family is from and he mumbles an answer, casting a furtive glance at me. I step on his foot under the table. Rita is not really listening, she is closing her eyes and singing to herself. She is tanked. Blessed fucking be.

     “My son was younger than you both. And he died. I was young too. When I had him.” I want to tell her that she’s still young but she is far away. She looks at her fingers, pruny and reddish even in the dim light, silently turning over her hand like a person searching for answers under stones. Her soup is probably cold, she barely ate, and I help her up. Rita flinches at first but then softens; resting her head against mine, allowing me to guide her to the stairs. One step at a time; one foot, other foot, stay. Wait together. She feels her way up along the walls and I watch her shadow rise above us like a soul leaving its body.

   Her room is smaller than mine and painted mint green, I wonder if she chose that shade. I help her with her shoes and she balances herself by holding onto my head, before flopping down on her comforter, hand still held aloft.

     “Why did you agree to this. You’re—”

     “I have a daughter,” I say, cutting her off before she makes me hate her. “You understand, Rita. You know.”

     Her mouth twists down into a grimace and she weeps without a sound. It’s hideous to watch but I have to watch because it could be me. It feels just as good. Tears spill down the corner of her eyes, leaving wet trails to her ears. A single sob escapes her mouth before it flattens; goes sideways into a strangled snore. She’s dead asleep.

     Nick is at the sink, washing dishes and I almost sidle up behind and put my arms around him. The way I used to with Luke. He always had his earbuds in and he’d sway, taking me with him even though I couldn’t hear what he was listening to. It was enough to follow. I always followed. When we married I took his name, despite Moira’s fervent objections. Primarily because I hated mine. It belonged to a man who barely cared to know me so why keep it? I will be this man’s instead. We’ll make a new family.

     I take my place alongside Nick and dry the dishes he’s just washed. The sound of the storm, battering just past the windows, carries a billowing sort of hum and it lulls. When we’re done, we move slowly back to the table but this time I sit next to him, my knee touching his. He passes me his untouched glass of wine. I take it.

     “I’m not supposed to drink.”

     “I know.” He looks away, over to the stairs. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want.”

     The wine is a beautiful color, fingers-in-currant-pies beautiful.  Smear-it-all-over-your-lips beautiful. I take the cup and bring it closer, leaning down to sniff it.

     “Is there a camera in here? Not in the wine. I mean the kitchen.”

     “Do you think there is?”

     “I don’t know. Yes. Maybe. I always feel like I'm being watched.”

     He shifts. Even his fidgeting is measured. I know what his bare feet look like. He has nice feet. “No.”

     “Are there cameras anywhere else?”

     Nick breathes in and looks down, he rubs alongside his thigh, just once and sits up. “Yes. There’s one outside the gates on the right hand corner, towards the markets. There is another one by the back garden shed. Soon there will be one on this door.”

     “But not yet?”

     “Not yet.”

     “Did he put you up to this? The Commander?”

     “He doesn’t know about it.” Nick grabs some bread off the table and bites into it.

     “I’m pregnant. I hope it’s yours, because that would make it marginally less fucked up.” Marginally, meaning slightly. Which is a lie.

     Nick blinks. Blinks again. His lips move. He puts the bread down.

     “Still okay with my drinking this wine?” I take a long swig and wipe at my mouth with my wrist. “Yummy.”

     His kiss tastes like berries and wine or me, us. The people we are; salty-sweet tang of dinner and loss and nerves. He’s not supposed to drink but he takes the wine from my lips and it is glad and it is sad. I place my ear on his chest and listen. I try not to think about getting caught or seen. Or hung up on a wall.

     The snow will reach the windows and he leaves to clear the stairs. He doesn’t ask me to come with him but he holds my hand as long as he can before he goes out into the snow. I take a bath, brush my teeth and walk the twenty-eight salted steps to his door. I know the guards are around, busy with their patrols, but they choose not to see me or maybe I'm just that good at being unobserved. Nick is already standing at the door, waiting, and he pulls me in, drying me with a towel the color of a faded apricot, so threadbare you can see yourself through it.

     I’d forgotten how good it can be—pregnancy sex. Like the poem says: _muscles better and nerves more_. My nerves are lit up; the entirety of me is electricity and I pass the current onto him as he moves underneath me. Never has my pleasure been so closely tied to the unknown. I don’t know if someone will walk in, a man, man in dark clothing with a gun. It strikes me then that Nick is a man in dark clothing with a gun and my moan is half laugh. I come this way, laughing, and come again, twice more in quick succession. He draws them out of me with his fingers and angles; he knows how to shift, where and how slow to go. His hip bones fit perfectly in the curve of my palms. I want to ask him how he knows my body this well. Did he study me before we ever touched, or maybe it is like this with all the women he’s fucked—interchangeable vessels with easy-to-sate needs and/or holes to plug—handled with easy, unfussy skill. He finishes with his head tilted back and his eyes shut tight, opening back up to me with a look of what seems like tenderness. I decide it must be. I don’t mention Luke, I’m not as angry as I thought I would be.

     “How old are you anyway?”

     It’s almost a laugh, the sound he makes, like a startled inhale. He regards me silently before saying “Thirty-one.”

     “I’m older than you,” I say primly, a scandalized schoolmarm.

     “Oh yeah? By how much. Five years, six?”

     “No, asshole. I’m thirty-four.”

     This time, there is no guessing. A laugh is a laugh. Higher than I expected, but charming, near-joyous like a brace of balloons flying out of a hand and into the sky.

     “I was reading when you were still in diapers,” I say churlishly as I climb off him, stretching out alongside.

     He freezes first. Then I follow, realizing what I’d just said.

     “Do you believe in all this bullshit?” I ask because I don’t really know.

     “What do you think?” he replies, looking at my mouth.

     That is no answer. His eyes are solidly brown, no hint of green or amber. They give away nothing.

     “I taught my daughter to read when she was three. If this one is a girl, I won’t be able to.”

     As soon as I say it, I know that I’m already letting go. My body isn’t mine and neither is this child, if it makes it past 12 weeks, six months, then nine until the time comes to push. Serena Joy will pretend to be in labor, doing her faux-Christian-Lamaze bullshit right behind me. Touching me with her talon hands. No and no and no. I’d stab her with one of her knitting needles. Right between the eyes.

      Nick rifles through his drawer and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He pulls one out with his mouth but then stops midway, tapping it back in. Luke didn’t smoke. He exercised. Ate clean. Does he still? Who is he now, this not-dead Luke that I still love? Even though, should we be lucky enough to meet again, that love might not be able to hold. How could it? I am both old and new. A thing that was free and one who is owned; tag at my ear like cattle.

     Love can’t always survive a war. In between dreaming of all the times we nuzzled and whispered like the lovers we most surely were, I've also come to hate him a little. For not listening when I told him we weren’t safe. For not acting when it could’ve made a difference. For thinking he could take care of me. For not taking care of me. I’m disgusted with myself because the person who didn’t just fucking pick up Hannah and leave was me. I was June Osborne and now I am June of-no-one. I still love my husband but I am not the same.

     “Could you save the baby? If it survives and I give birth. Could you get it away from this place?”

     Nick puts his hand on my stomach, there’s nothing there yet to feel. But I can feel it. I can’t tell you if this is faith or love.

//

     He’s awake before I am, scowling in the half-light. I touch his nose, his strong dark brows, the beauty mark by his mouth, his lips. I slide my hand down his arm to his wrist, the softer patch where he wears his watch. I memorize him so that I can add him to my story. Once it is written, it won’t be forgotten. Someone will always be able to read it, swallow the words, keep them inside. He sits up and kisses me like it’s the last time, like it needs to last, and with us, it will have to. I love him, I love him not.

     I make my way back to the main house, flying practically, my feet barely making a crunch. By the right of the stairs, I see tracks in the snow, a cat. I used to have a cat. We couldn’t take him with us when we ran. And we couldn’t leave him behind in case his anguished meowing alerted the neighbors to our absence. Luke was never one to act when he needed to, he preferred to wait until pressed. The day we left, he was pressed. We had to go.

     Luke is. IS, not was. I have to keep reminding myself of this.

//

     There’s another version of this tale. Superior in every way. The language so powerful and so stark, it frightens the reader into thinking it fantasy because how could something like that ever happen here? It will be taught in schools and young women will nod to themselves in recognition. They have all imagined it and kept the thought to themselves. Because believing could act like a conjuring. A fall down the stairs that you see before it happens; the dark below and the floor rushing up to meet you with a hard kiss.

     Luke, probably dead. My baby in a photograph, sweet and smiling in a white dress. A Handmaiden’s red hem whispering along a hallway at The Center. The Commander speaking to me with lowered lashes. Serena Joy, much older, with gnarled knitting fingers and a cane—a Tammy Faye manqué. Moira. Ofglen. Nick saying _no romance, okay?_  The Jezebels. She finds the spangled dress. The black van comes and I get in it.

     In this version of the story, I do not have a package to pick up, my rebellion is desire. With that in play, I don’t taste the ashes as much, as Nick is a fitting distraction. Fucking me into compliance with a few orgasms and the promise of trust. He doesn’t want my words, he just wants my sweat on his squeaky cot linens. There is no revealing. I am pregnant here as well. My breast ache and every smell is a nightmare. It’s his. It will be. I want. I am a girl. A girl that talks and questions little, happy with her compensations.

//

     The local streets have been shoveled and I walk with the new Ofglen to the shops, arms linked tight to avoid a fall. The lights in Loaves and Fishes flicker, and in their on/off flash I catch the momentary glances of the Guardians, frozen in lit-up seconds, separated from their valuable context. Vulnerable. I hope this means something.

     Oranges are large in my hand, almost as big as grapefruits, and I weigh, squeeze, and pray. My kind of prayer. Not the kind you buy in a store, the kind that means nothing; no, the kind that starts small in your head and grows, spiraling outwards, towards infinity. The way belief is infinite. Or should be.

     My dress is clean and pressed and I wear it like a disguise. In the kitchen, Rita has gone back to scowling. She washes the lettuces, running a practiced thumb on each leaf’s spine, dislodging earth and insects with her fingernail. Nick polishes his shoes.

     The roadways are finally clear of ice and supper will be waiting. The only sign of rebellion is an over-watered orchid; the roots gone soft and sour, drowning in their ceramic pot.

     I eat an orange in the kitchen and the juice dribbles down my arm to my elbow leaving a dark wet stripe on my red sleeve. Rita chops root vegetables, announces a pot roast, and the news that The Commander and Mrs. Waterford will be back this evening. They will not miss the ceremony.

     Everybody wants a miracle. They’re the greatest stories of all.

//

     Serena Joy finds the dress and smacks me into a doorframe. As I go down, I think, stupidly, _ow_.

     The rest is another series of fragments from the most current revision: I am pregnant. Hannah in a pink dress turning to follow the path of a pointed finger. The slow climb to Nick’s locked door. The Commander not promising my daughter’s safety and, in that smooth silky way of his, calling me a liar. As if hurt, as if he's not my rapist. I am sorry (not sorry), Aunt Lydia. Those contraband letters; hundreds of stories and names stashed behind a bathtub. Weapons one can carry in plain sight.

     The bells ring out and I know they’re for me. Storm or no storm, there is no reprieve, that quiet moment will never come. Nick enters my room and whispers in my ear,  _Trust me._

     We’re back to the first page. I let the Eyes lead me to the black van. The doors close. Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing.

     But you do. Help me. Resist. Use the hands you’re still allowed to use and continue the tale. Words are lies and words are truth and words are everything. They will help us survive. Always.

**Author's Note:**

> The lines from the poem June mentions are from _i like my body when it is with your_ by e.e. cummings.
> 
> “Whether this is my end or a new beginning I have no way of knowing” is from _The Handmaid's Tale_ by Margaret Atwood.


End file.
